Comment by AdmiralAsshat

But your reasoning is still riddled with assumptions, namely that "If I hear someone answer the phone with an Indian accent, it means I'm dealing with a low-skilled/low-paid outsource worker who is going to waste my time." Here's why these assumptions are flawed:

1) As I already mentioned, we had foreign-born workers living in the US, with accents. They were highly-skilled, highly-qualified, and getting the same wage as all of our other US colleagues.

2) We had coworkers in India at all levels of support, L1-L3. I'm sure payband was the motivating factor in their hire, but timezone availability was a large consideration as well. And they were eminently qualified: some of them could run circles around me from a knowledge perspective.

3) The kernel of truth which you may have touched upon and which some of our customers may have inferred is that for historical reasons, most of our L1's were in India and most of the L2's or L3's were American. So yes, if you got a guy with an American on the phone, he was probably going to be better-equipped to solve your problem--because he was an L2/L3. But the reason that guy didn't answer the phone had little to do with how much the company cares about support; it was because the L2's had more important shit to do, like filing bug reports, or code diving, or debugging. And if I'm interrupting a GDB session to take a call, I expect that an L1 has done the bare minimum of triaging first to ensure that I'm not answering a question that could have been resolved by RTFM.

We can argue all day about whether to call these assumptions "racism" or not, but I would argue that whatever their origin, they feed into that sense of customer entitlement that leads to customers screaming at my colleagues over the phone as soon as they hear an Indian accent. And that's horseshit.

I'll leave you with a final example: we had a very irate CEO customer once in a conference call for a longstanding issue, and the call on our end included several product support leads, managers, and developers. At some point we decided to bring the company's Director of Software Engineering onto the call to try to calm the customer down. The director had an Indian name and was physically in our office but was introduced by name rather than title. The CEO responded by saying, "I don't wanna talk to some freaking guy in Bangalore!"